


Rags, Ghosts, Guns

by Nemonus



Category: Destiny (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-16 00:14:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5805790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, for Guardians, it's difficult to tell murder from mercy killing. Eris lost a lot of things in the Pit, but she gained discernment in that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rags, Ghosts, Guns

“Help,” the child said, staring at each of them in turn. The cat in her arms flicked its ears.  
  
Eris stopped suddenly, and her fireteam crowded around behind her, looking over one another’s shoulders. Omar and Sai had demanded that Eris, Eriana, and Toland come with them to the library halfway to the Wall, saying that if Guardians banded together they were more likely to be perceived as a faction or traders and less likely to be mobbed; Tarlowe kept watch at the flat. There weren't many people out at this time of night, only the occasional sounds of reverie or a game hunter, trudging like the Guardians back home after a search that had lasted all day.  
  
Now they trudged back, tired, Sai and the Ghosts the only ones really watching their steps in the dim light. Strings of bare bulbs glowed in the occasional twilit ally, but more often the lights were furtive yellow pools behind tarps, generators buzzing in the leaning enclosures of wooden shacks or stone houses. The girl - exactly the civilian Omar and Sai had hoped not to run into on their way, but simply a lost person on the way back - resettled the kitten against her fur-lined coat and looked very lost.  
  
“You okay?” Sai asked, the others falling in behind her.  
  
The girl shook her head.  
  
“You have parents?” Omar said, brightly.  
  
“Back in the common,” she said.  
  
Eris knew the maps of the city reasonably well: she felt more comfortable when she was familiar with streets she might one day have to walk. “The nearest square is not far,” she said, catching Sai’s eye.  
  
“You’re Guardians,” the girl said, and Eris’ mood fell as the girl’s expression turned from slack fear to a more honest interest. “People say you help people.”  
  
Another child, smaller and of indiscriminate gender in the dark, edged out of the ally. Omar held out a hand toward the second child, palm out, and both flinched. “You need to work on your pickpocketing game,” Omar said in the same even, cheerful tone. “One of you should've come around behind us, from the other side of the road.”  
  
The second child seemed frozen. Eris looked to Eriana, wondering whether these two needed glimmer for food. It had been a long time since she had seen children - real children, not new Guardians with rags and Ghosts and guns -  
  
Eriana shuffled in her Warlock cloak and then bent down and opened her palm, revealing glimmer nestled in her glove. She tipped the money into the girl’s hand. “Now go,” she said.  
  
Both of the kids walked away, furtive, the cat looking over the girl’s shoulder with wide yellow eyes.  
  
The Guardians kept moving, spreading out across the empty street. Eris thought back to the books she had read in the disused library behind her, the theories about the Hive. The library had only survived in the City for so long because the Warlocks knew about it, and had elected to keep the fragile paper texts in their places rather than move them to the Tower. Some of the books had directly contradicted what she already knew; others contained theories that, as far as she knew, were impossible to test.  
  
Just as the silence settled and Eris had adopted a rangy walk that took her a bit father from the others, Toland said, quiet and scornful, “Their scam worked better than expected.”  
  
“What would you have done?” Omar snapped.  
  
“Let the food chain play out.” Toland stopped on the packed-earth street, his cloak flapping around his legs.  
  
Omar stayed for a moment, watching the shadows in the alleys. Then he moved across the street in long, thudding steps and pulled a blunt-nosed pistol. Eriana bristled; Sai smirked; Eris caught her breath. Omar pointed the gun at Toland. Thankful for Omar, Eris narrowed her eyes.  
  
“They’re just kids,” Omar said.  
  
“What mandates this kindness? Even the Light just waits.” Toland raised a languid, absent hand toward the Traveler.  
  
“Can I kill him?” Omar asked, his gaze flicking toward Eriana. “Like, actually kill him.”  
      
Toland tipped his head in confusion, incidentally away from the gun.  
  
Eriana said, “You’re angry at the kids, Omar. You’re angry because there isn’t justice in it.”  
      
“He is angry because he was foolish,” Toland said, and Eriana looked carefully around at the nearby alleys to make sure they were empty, and nodded at Omar.  
  
Omar shot Toland twice in the same shoulder and once in the head.  
  
Eris turned away, not liking the slump of the body or the sparks. In the Crucible, death would be honorable; this was something more like brotherly rivalry, but too heightened and too angry. Eriana was glaring; Sai had her hands over her mouth, had gone almost as white as Eris. Eris looked at Toland’s Ghost while Toland re-formed in lowering strands of light. Omar, Eris knew, had wanted to do that for a while.  
  
Maybe Eriana saw it as a controlled expression of the inevitable.  
  
With the Traveler this close, the push and pull of Toland’s presence as a new creature was vivid and clean. A moment later, personality wrapped around him like a cloak, and she felt the corruption threaded through him again. Omar’s eyes were wide, his mouth hesitant, unsure whether he had gone too far.  
  
Sai laughed, a pealing, hysterical sound with a slightly mean edge.  
  
Toland straightened his collar, and looked so ruffled and uptight that Eris and Eriana started to laugh at the same time.  
  
“He won’t do it again,” Sai smiled.  
      
“I might,” Omar said.  
      
But Eriana was unsettled, by Omar’s enthusiasm or her own decision, her lights flickering in uneven bursts. “Not again.”

* * *

  
“Death is just a littoral space, a space in between.”  
  
_You’re in between the door and I_ , Eris thought. Maybe Toland picked up on her rising irritation; he eased around to look over his shoulder, considering the straw mattress and Eris sitting cross-legged on it. He had been hunched over the desk for a long time, while the others left and night fell and Eris sharpened her blades. Now, the knives and the stones had been put away, and she thought about the long dark walk and the endless elevator ride that she would face if she returned to the Tower. The pen in Toland’s right hand, which had not touched the paper in several minutes as far as Eris had noticed, ticked against the table as he twitched it back and forth.  
  
“Yes, we come from the Traveler and are reborn of the Traveler,” Eris said. “We are always in that space.”  
  
Toland turned suddenly, the legs of the chair scraping across the floor. His eyes were wide, and slightly bloodshot. “There! See! Perhaps you have considered it.”  
  
Only for a moment, Eris thought. Toland was not as clever as he imagined himself to be.  
  
“We exist always in a state of death and non-death…Are you staying?”  
  
She was taken aback by the quick change in both subject and tone, from lazy to focused, but realized after a moment that she _did_ want to stay in the flat overnight, because she was comfortable here as well as because of the night. She could separate her attraction to the mystery of him from the banal reality, and she wanted to know what he would do if she stayed.  
  
A very Warlock quality, she thought: this would be nothing if not an experiment, a stress test of her own bulwarks.  
  
Eris challenged herself into meeting Toland’s eyes.  
  
He, meanwhile, seemed unfazed. Disinterested, she would have thought, if he hadn’t gestured her forward.  
  
“Look,” he said, and she moved fast enough that his long fingers brushed against her face accidentally as she looked at the map under his right hand. “The pit is almost open to us. What causality we might find there …” He shrugged his near shoulder.  
  
“You’re at a dead end,” she said. “You haven’t written anything since I started watching you.”  
  
“Tired, maybe. You have wise eyes, Eris …”  
  
“I’m not going to sleep in the front room, so if you want space on the bed, tell me before I sprawl on it.”  
  
He looked back and forth between her and the map, settled on staring at the pen while he held it still. “Is this limerent attention?”  
  
“I don’t know what that means.”  
  
“We’ll test it and find out,” he said, and stood up slowly and gradually. The words wormed around her. She had never figured out his accent, only wondered why something in his brain had persisted, after his Ghost raised him, to speak like something rotting at the bottom of a swamp —  
  
He invited scrutiny, so she looked him up and down and quirked her lips in what she thought might be too subtle an approval.  
  
“You see?” He said after some time, smiling as she squirmed, his eyes focused over her shoulder. “Simplicity.”  
  
Wolves howled outside the City walls. There would be tigers prowling on the tundras too, Eris thought, and eagle stooping, all the predatory things living out their unseeing lives under the Traveler. It would be cold outside. It would be cold inside if not for the smallness of the room. The two Ghosts had set down beside one another on the table, very still and dim, their flanges not quite touching.  
  
“Look at me,” Eris said, because he was staring at the cot behind her head. His legs were tense and very still next to hers. “If this is happening, you can’t ignore me.”  
  
His lips twisted, and she reached up with one hand to grip his jaw.  
  
By the time she must have been hurting him, his eyes were locked on hers. She felt him relax, saw his eyes gain more lucidity.  
  
By the time she wondered whether it was the pain that he wanted, he was kissing her.

* * *

  
They went into the pit together, all six of them, and were separated, and when she saw Toland alone she hated feeling relief.

* * *

  
“We shouldn’t kill like this. We shouldn’t kill for food - “  
  
“Shh, shh. Look, they have become nothing. They have lost the world and you have become the new world to them as you are the world to me.  
  
“Eris. Eat.”

* * *

  
The worst times were when she enjoyed it: when the nausea in her stomach became something she clung to as the wormspore clung to the walls. That was when she let him feed her, and licked his fingers; that was when she pushed him past the corpses and pressed her lips against his blood- and dirt-spattered neck while both of them kept one eye open for horrors in the tunnels. They tended one another’s wounds and pressed blue fingers against enflamed skin. Sometimes he kissed her forehead, and she relished his whispers and the sting of the chitin around the emerging eye.

* * *

  
Then, he left.  
  
Was taken, but not Taken.  
  
Then, Eris began to remember.

* * *

  
Eris started to kill more judiciously, even though she had long spells where she would tell herself it didn’t matter. The only direction that existed any more was any direction that would keep her alive, and those were usually the dark places; fungal growths uncultivated, ground unstirred. Where none of the fecund industry of the Hive was permitted to grow, there she crouched in the odd corners.  
  
But gradually, she found herself taking paths upward, looking for light and Light she remembered. Light was a nest, she told herself. Light was a place deep underground, and to get there she had to climb.  
  
In this way, she convinced herself to claw her way up.  
  
Sometimes, she thought about Toland. He had gone all the way beyond death just to avoid helping anyone. He helped her in the pit, but only when he was consumed by their mutual mission, only when surrounded by the things he loved and obsessed over.  
  
He was the green in the stone, he was the black in the shadows, he had nearly sewed the cursed eyes into her —  
  
And when she climbed out of the pit she left some of those things behind.

* * *

  
Eris ranged across the regolith for a long time.  
  
For months, she thought to herself, and laughed and coughed. The cracks in the moon had lead her to the edge of the dividing line between day and night, and she finally climbed out of the eternal evening hungry and unsure whether she was walking east or south. She had packed supplies, but had no way to know how long she would need them. Maybe Guardians had been pushed off the moon entirely. She could not fly a tombship to Earth.  
  
Eris averted her eyes from the Earthshine when she saw it, because it was so bright.  
  
Not long before her stores ran out, she found a Guardian. She saw the footings of the Line first, then the wreck.  
  
He had been in over his head, she thought immediately. ( _He lost_ chased the thought down and bit at it. _His love was weaker than his enemy’s love and so he died in love, smothered in it, what good and faithful worshippers were they!_ )  
  
His assistant in death had been a Knight. Its corpse hung over the back of his Sparrow, facing the Earth.  
  
Eris rounded the Sparrow to find, to her surprise that the Guardian wasn’t dead. The Ghost hovered over him, talking fastidiously. “We will get you out of here. Yes. Yes we will.”  
  
Eris jumped back and hissed, because she didn’t trust things that didn’t stay dead. She prodded them and took their bones apart until she was sure, until Toland told her they had seen this kind before —  
  
“Hello, Guardian,” the Ghost said, turning its little light to her, and Eris bared her teeth. The flitting thing had called her by the name of its dying partner, and —  
  
Not so much dying; the Titan man tried to wriggle out from under his own ruined, heavily armored arm. It looked like he had tried to shield his face, and the arm had been cloven by the sword. His gun was propped up against the Sparrow, fallen from his other hand.  
  
“What happened?” Eris said, then realized that she had to raise her voice above a whisper. The skin on her shoulders prickled, because something behind a wall of rock was liable to hear her as she croaked.  
  
“The Knight!” said the excitable Ghost. “I suppose we weren’t ready for it. He’ll be all right in a minute, won’t you, Kadras…”  
  
“Yeah,” said the Titan, nodding over the ruin of his arm.  
  
“You can kill him," Eris said. ( _You can give a little Light to the Darkness, you can remove yourself from the equation if you do not add up to victory. This will happen to you eventually regardless._ )  
  
Eris’ longing for her own Ghost surged.  
  
“No.” Kadras wriggled. “I’m not … used to that yet. I can get up. I can walk.”  
  
“No,” said Eris. He probably couldn’t. He would be wormfood if he tried.  
  
How was he not used to it? The Hive-held moon was no place for children.  
  
“You will rot,” she said.  
  
“What are you? I’ve seen a lot of crap these days but —”  
  
“Someone will come for us,” said the Ghost, affronted. “It was just a patrol.”  
  
“Do you tell me that the moon is open? Guardians patrol it?”  
  
“Yes, yes.” The Ghost said.  
  
She looked around for the Mare Imbrium charnel she expected, and saw none. Maybe her sense of direction had been even more badly addled than she expected —  
  
Her legs almost gave way at the thought that the Guardians might have finally won.  
  
But, her new instincts said, she would have felt it if the walls shook, if time became untangled from its creator. She could tell that Mare Imbrium had not been fully avenged. “Crota still lives.”  
  
“Yes, yes, but we’re working on it,” said the Ghost. Kadras groaned. For a moment that blurred her vision, Eris hated him; hated him while he lay here trying not to die.

She had long ago learned that a knife was more useful than a gun without ammunition, so she had a long bone blade that she had found embedded between the ribs of an ogre. Some old Hive in-fighting had scarred over with scales and boils, and she had dug it out.  
  
She lunged forward. To her surprise, the Ghost moved in front of his Guardian as if to shield him; she felt the small impact against her chest, and edged sideways to get at the Titan. He screamed and hit her solidly with his left, whole hand, sending pain flaring over the side of her head.  
  
Something crunched underneath her, and as it did the Titan spasmed back far enough that she could grip both the hilt and the blade and press down on his neck.  
  
For a moment she lay halfway over the Sparrow.  
  
The Ghost made a small sound of what might have been approval as it started to reconstitute the Guardian, and Eris slunk back to crouch against the nearest, small hill she could find, suddenly desperate for something at her back.  
  
_If you run_ , she thought, _you get chased._  
  
_I won’t kill (for Toland) any more. For other things?_  
  
“You will need as many whole Guardians as possible to fight what walks here,” Eris told the Ghost, and walked away.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this conversation](http://nemonuus.tumblr.com/post/137649752959/jencforcarolina-illumynare-something-i) about how Guardians view death and injury.


End file.
